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'London Riots Facial Recognition' Vigilantes Abandon Their Project

After a group of digilantes formed a Google Group this week dedicated to applying facial recognition technology to photos from the London riots to identify culprits, it caused quite a stir in the media. After a recent study showing that facial recognition technology is at a point where it can identify strangers with reasonable accuracy if they have Facebook accounts, the novel amateur crime-fighting technique seemed momentous.

But the group’s organizer contacted me today to say that the group of developers has abandoned the project. They created an experimental app using tools from Face.com and tested it with 30 of their friends. Their plan had been to release a Facebook app to the public so that people in the UK could volunteer to scan riot photos to see if any of the ne’er-do-wells were friends of theirs. (Not good friends, I’d have to assume.) They also gave me access to the app to give it a try. The results were too disappointing for the digilantes to actually release it. It wasn’t identifying people it should (friends of the guinea pigs) with high degrees of confidence, and it was saying with relatively high degrees of confidence that rioters were people who they were not. In my test, the app was 22% sure that this alleged thief is a marketing acquaintance of mine in New York and it was 58% sure that this troublemaker is a teacher I know in California.

“Bear in mind the amount of time and money that people like Facebook, Google, and governments have put into work on facial recognition compared to a few guys playing around with some code,” says the group’s organizer, who prefers not to be identified after receiving a number of angry emails about the attempt to out rioters. “Without serious time and money we would never be able to come up with a decent facial recognition system.”

Meanwhile, Scotland Yard says it is putting facial recognition technology into use, according to the AP, using a face-recognizing tool that was being developed in preparation for hosting the Olympics in 2012.

“Of course if we had made any matches, we would have handed any findings over to the police, but that was highly unlikely from the start,” he added. Meanwhile, UK police continue to upload new photos from CCTV cameras to their Flickr account asking members of the public to assist in identifying them. Police say that over a thousand people have been arrested. The Greater Manchester police have taken to shaming those convicted on Twitter, tweeting their names and birthdates, and uploading their mug shots to their website.

Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf and Alexis Madrigal make interesting observations. Madrigal points out that having too much data is a struggle for authorities after a riot. Despite the plethora of social media evidence from this summer’s hockey riot in Vancouver, after a month of investigating, authorities there have fewer than 150 solid suspects. Friedersdorf says the riots will be a special test for London, which is famed for the extensiveness of its ‘Ring of Steel’ surveillance state. Ubiquitous surveillance cameras failed to prevent looting and rioting; will they be more effective when it comes to identifying and prosecuting those involved?

[P]erhaps the British surveillance state won’t make much of a difference in preventing future riots or prosecuting people in the aftermath of this one. If law enforcement there isn’t any better at punishing rioters than their analogues in other countries, that’s a strong argument for rethinking their whole system: if surveillance doesn’t prevent wanton street violence and property destruction, the notion that its benefits outweigh its costs (loss of privacy and potential abuse by authorities) is all the more dubious.

This will certainly increase the pressure on UK law enforcement to make use of novel technological means to identify those involved. With access to higher resolution photos of rioters, and potential access to better databases of identifying photos — like those at the DMV — they might have greater success with facial recognition than amateur digital vigilantes.

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